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byebye, opensolaris

There is a desire to stop delivering the 32-bit xVM hypervisor in OpenSolaris.

Machines that typically run xVM have many guests, one of the central roles of
virtualization (to consolidate many physical machines). The limitations of a 4gb
address space make it unfeasible to support many modern OS guests on 32-bit systems.

Well, my one 32bit host that i’m going to keep active happens to have 13GB Ram right now, with the upgrade to 16GB coming up soon.

That equals over 60 VMs of today’s standard 256MB size.
I remember the fight us people had to go through 3-4 years ago to get PAE support for boxes with enough ram because developers back didn’t see the use case for running more than 3-4 VMs on a host.

While my heart feels with the dev’s that are probably still using 4GB desktops and never liked that whole PAE thing (because they had 512MB to them back then?) and I’ll grant there is a testing burden, I still can’t put it more nicely than “WTF is going on int your head, do I really have to go all this crap again?”

When even Microsoft has people clueful enough to keep up support for server features, why can’t osol???

This is the second goddamn stupid decision made in Opensolaris I’m aware of (#1 was the decision against a split driver for NPIV.. The presentation said it was too complicated to be feasible to implement. On the last slide, they reference a small storage company that DID implement a split mode driver!). Not delivering a split mode driver kills like 60% of the technical and administrative gains of NPIV.